Horizon (1964) Episode Scripts

N/A - Lost Horizons - The Big Bang

1
For as long as we've been able to think,
we've wondered how we got here
and some of the ideas we've come
up with have been, well, remarkable.
Every civilisation and religion
in history's had its own.
In one, the universe
arrived after a snail's shell
mysteriously released
a hen and a pigeon.
In another, a giant emerged
from an enormous egg.
Today, we have the Big Bang,
the equally remarkable idea that the
universe simply began from nothing.
First of all, what do we
really know about the Big Bang?
I find it hard to accept
the Big Bang theory.
This is the story of how the Big Bang
evolved from a left-field proposition.
Two theories of how the
universe itself came into being.
To an accepted explanation
of how the universe began.
Only experiments can tell
us what the way forward is.
We have an outrageous ambition to understand
the world, how it works, that's our objective.
As told by over 50 years of BBC science.
I call it, sometimes, the greatest
adventure of the human mind.
For generations, scientists, and
particularly physicists like me,
have tried to understand how the
world around us came into being.
In the mid 1940s, as
many physicists returned
to the front line of science
and began focusing once again
on the most fundamental questions, there was deep
disagreement about the origin of our universe.
At the centre of this debate
were two opposing theories.
The first, is that the
universe has always been around.
It had no beginning, it'll have no end
but is pretty much the way we see it today.
It was the brainchild of Fred
Hoyle, a distinguished mathematician
and cosmologist who worked
here at Cambridge University.
Professor Hoyle passionately
disagreed with the second idea,
that the universe somehow was created
out of nothing in an almighty explosion.
But, ironically, it was
he who ensured that this
everything-from-nothing idea
captured the public imagination.
In 1949, he coined the term Big Bang,
originally intended as a
belittling term of abuse.
The BBC presents the
Nature of the Universe.
The speaker is Fred Hoyle,
a Cambridge mathematician and
Fellow of St John's College.
This Big Bang assumption is much
the less palatable of the two,
for it's an irrational process that
can't be described in scientific terms.
On philosophical grounds too, I can't see any
good reason for preferring the Big Bang idea.
Indeed, it seems to me in the philosophical
sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion,
since it puts the basic
assumption out of sight
where it can never be challenged
by direct appeal to observation.
Professor Hoyle called his
own idea the Steady State Model
and at the time many cosmologists
preferred it to its rival.
Hoyle passionately believed that his
theory would eventually be borne out
by observation, whereas the Big Bang
would, and to his mind, could not.
The truth is, at a time when
computers were men with pencils
and only fruit flies and rhesus
monkeys had ever been into space,
saying anything meaningful about
how the universe came into being
just by looking at the stars
was exceptionally difficult.
In 1929, however, a man called
Hubble had looked into the night sky
with his telescope and
noticed an extraordinary thing,
a remarkable observation
that would precipitate
the revolutionary idea that Professor Hoyle
would eventually sneeringly label the Big Bang.
What Hubble saw from his
mountain top in California
was that the steady, old, dependable
universe was, in fact, anything but.
Galaxies, he noted, were hurtling away
from each other at alarming speeds.
On the eve of the Great Depression,
a universe in chaos was the last
thing people wanted to hear about.
The reason that Hubble knew
this intergalactic weirdness
was in full swing was down to some
thoroughly uncontroversial physics.
Demonstrated with admirable
surrealism by Horizon in 1978.
This baroque experiment was
first tried by a Dutch physicist
in the flatlands of Holland, steam
engine, uniform, bandsmen and all.
The schoolmasterly enthusiasts
beside a canal in Kent
have repeated the experiment
for us in the same way,
probably for the first
time in 140 years.
Yes, half a semitone?
- Do you think?
- Yes.
- What speed do you think he was doing, 40 kilometres?
- 40 kilometres.
The expert trumpeters on the train
certainly held their pitch constant
at middle C, but listeners on the ground
heard the tone change as
the locomotive puffed by.
It was the physicist
Christian Doppler of Prague
who first pointed out 150 years
ago that such a change of pitch
would be expected whenever a steady source
of waves moved with respect to an observer.
Today, we call it the Doppler Shift.
Approaching
- higher pitch, shorter waves.
Receding
- lower pitch, longer waves.
Yes, a semitone, about a semitone.
The Doppler Shift is
just about symmetrical.
Whether source or listener
moves, the effect is there.
But what do trains and trumpeters
have to do with galaxies?
It turns out that the Doppler
Shift also applies to light.
By measuring changes in the
wavelength of light emitted
from galaxies, Hubble was able to figure out
that galaxies were flying away from each other.
And receding galaxies
could mean only one thing.
The universe was expanding.
Hubble's expanding universe caused
a stir because of what it implied.
An expanding universe means that
tomorrow it'll be bigger than it is today.
This also means that yesterday
it would have been smaller,
the day before smaller still,
and if you keep winding
the clock back in time,
you'd eventually arrive
at a moment in history
when all the stuff of the universe is
clumped together in a single tiny region.
It was this idea of a
single point of creation
that caused the big debate
between the Big Bang believers
and people like Fred Hoyle, who were adamant
that the universe is in a steady state.
In Hoyle's universe, there
was no point of creation,
and all matter hadn't been
produced at one moment in the past.
In fact, he believed new
matter was forming all the time.
As you probably know, there
are two forms of cosmology,
what has been spoken of as the
Big Bang and the Steady State.
There are actually many
Big Bang cosmologies
and they all have the property
that the universe is supposed to
have started at a particular moment.
Do you reject this Big Bang
theory, this concept of a beginning
and an evolution and a going on?
Well, I do and I always have done
for reasons that you might think
are not altogether astronomical.
I've always been impressed by the view,
the views of people who argue that
the plants and animals on the Earth,
all this complexity, was due to
them being suddenly made in that way.
We know now since Darwin
that this is completely wrong.
We had just the same story
with the chemical elements.
People said, "Well, all the different
elements like sodium, oxygen,
"the carbon in our bodies, and
so on, had always been that way",
but we know this isn't true,
that the oxygen that you
and I now are breathing
was actually made inside stars
and that the iron in our
cars was made inside stars.
So that the lesson that one learns
from these cases is that one doesn't
impress on the universe
its properties in the start.
Things develop out of the basic
laws, the basic laws of physics,
and I believe this must be so
for the universe as a whole.
Then how is it made?
Well, I don't think it was.
I think that what we can
show, quite definitely,
is that individual particles
have got to be made.
If I could perhaps, sort of,
demonstrate the point of view
that I have, and the point of
view that the other chaps have.
Suppose I draw along here a direction,
just one direction to represent space.
That's the three dimensions of space?
Yes, all in one. And this way, time.
Now, what the Big Bang people
say is that the particles,
each individual particle,
is a sort of line on here and they
all start at the same moment of time.
But that's to say, these are
the beginning points here,
but they don't give any
sort of physical description
of what causes them to begin,
whereas I think one has to
give a correct mathematical
physical description
of what one means by the
beginning of a particle
and I think when you do that, you don't
find that they all begin at the same moment.
I think you find that they are
scattered with ends at different times,
that they are all mixed together.
This is what, what I find.
And that when you give correct
mathematical description to this,
you'll find that the universe itself
didn't have to have a beginning.
Hoyle did have a point.
Nobody had ever been able to prove
that the universe had a beginning,
it was a purely theoretical concept.
Galaxies flying away from each
other, flying away from each other.
Beyond any radio sources that any of
us knew about or even dreamed existed.
It's just flooding in at us.
But then, in 1965, the Big Bang brigade
received a big boost thanks to a curious
horn-shaped antenna in New Jersey.
The horn antenna had been part of a
very early satellite transmission system.
But with the rapid march of
technology it soon became redundant.
That's when two young
astronomers from Bell Laboratories
decided to adapt its use
to study our galaxy instead.
That detector, a horn looking
like an old-fashioned ear trumpet
for a hard of hearing giant, sits on
its hilltop in Homedale, New Jersey.
Among all the listening ears in the world, it
was this one that caught the crucial whisper back
in 1965, the lucky start
towards today's cosmology.
What it sensed came from far
beyond the familiar universe
of the great optical telescopes.
Centre stage, our Sun and its planets,
merely one of a myriad of stars
which orbit in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Near us too, the other
galaxies of our local group,
a couple of million light years away.
Plenty of other galaxies in
groups and singly crowd the stage.
Homedale saw beyond all these.
Beyond even the thousand million
other galaxies we can dimly detect.
Using the Homedale Horn, two radio
astronomers, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias,
with a mixture of chance and care,
came upon the great discovery.
The horn is carefully designed and
built to catch microwave signals.
That is, radio waves as short
as the width of your hand.
OK, I'm ready at this end, go ahead.
Before Penzias and Wilson could
begin with their experiments,
they had to calibrate the detector.
OK, we start 30 degrees,
all right, and we are now on the sky.
Here we had purposely picked
a portion of the spectrum,
a wavelength of seven centimetres
where we expect that nothing or almost
nothing, no radiation at all from the sky.
Instead what we happened
is that we found radiation
coming into our antenna
from all directions.
It's just flooding in at us.
This was, to put it
baldly, an embarrassment.
Maybe something in the Big Horn
antenna was making excess noise.
Naturally, we focused
first on the antenna.
Now we had some suspicion,
because the throat of the
antenna came into the cab
and that was an attractive place
for pigeons, who liked to stay there,
especially in the cold winter.
We didn't mind that because they
flew away when we came, except that
they had coated the surface
with a white sticky material
which might not only absorb radio
waves but then emit radio waves,
which could be part or
maybe all of our result.
When we were able to dismantle our
antenna and clean these surfaces,
putting the antenna back again we found to our
surprise that most of the effect was still there.
The signal remained unceasing.
Almost reluctantly, they
had to recognise the signal
was coming from somewhere
outside, but what was its source?
It seemed to be coming from everywhere.
So now we were stuck with the sky beyond
which was not easy for us to accept,
that this radiation was
coming from somewhere
in really deep cosmic space beyond
any radio sources that any of us
knew about or even dreamed existed.
But, unknown to Penzias and Wilson,
a mere 30 miles away
at Princeton University,
another group was dreaming about just
such radio sources from deep cosmic space.
The group was led by
the physicist Bob Dicke,
who was renowned for
devising novel experiments
to probe the early universe.
This was all motivated by an
old interest I had connected
with what were well established views
of the universe at that time, that the
universe was an expanding structure,
galaxies flying away from each
other, flying away from each other
ever more rapidly the
farther away they were.
The implication, of course, of
all this is if you simply send
time backwards, everything is
closer together in the past.
So there's an idea of something
blowing up or flying apart.
Dicke saw that the early universe
would at least do one thing.
The fireball would be so hot
that it would endow the universe
with plenty of radiation to start with.
That radiation would
still be around today
and Dicke said it
should be searched for.
He left Professor Jim Peebles
to work out the details.
If this radiation is present,
will we be able to detect it and
will we know we're detecting it
and not radiation from
something else in the universe?
We know that there
are many radio sources,
galaxies that are emitting
radiation at longer wavelengths.
How do we know this radiation
won't get in the way?
But in a twist of fate, the radiation
had already been detected at Homedale.
When Arno Penzias heard about
the Princeton experiment,
he picked up the phone
and called Bob Dicke.
Well, Bob received the call we heard
the discussion in the background,
bits and pieces of it, couldn't
imagine what was happening.
Bob came back and said, "Boys,
I think we might have it."
The news was out, the Homedale whisper
was no less than an echo of
the origin of the universe.
The phenomenon was considered such a
significant piece of the cosmological jigsaw,
that its accidental discoverers,
Penzias and Wilson, received the
Nobel Prize for physics in 1978.
Jim Peebles and Bob
Dicke on the other hand,
who had correctly interpreted
the Homedale Whisper
as the echo of the Big Bang,
received absolutely nothing.
But it was good news
for the Big Bang theory
because the Steady State idea
could offer no explanation as to
where this radiation was coming from.
Not that Fred Hoyle and the devotees
of the Steady State were dissuaded.
They set to work questioning whether the
radiation really did come from the Big Bang.
In the beginning, I thought this
was pretty bad for the theory
when it was first discovered
but then it's been found
that straightforward sources are
emitters of high frequency radio waves
and far infrared on an enormous scale,
so it's a completely open
question today, I believe,
as to whether this background really
comes from the general universe
or whether it comes from sources in
the general manner of radio astronomy.
And Hoyle was not alone with
his dislike for the Big Bang.
For myself, I find it hard
to accept the Big Bang theory.
I would like to reject it.
I much prefer Mr Hoyle's
more subtle Steady State,
but I have to face the
facts as a working physicist.
The evidence mounts up.
Experiment after experiment
suggests that the clear predictions
of the most naive theory,
the Big Bang, are coming true.
The Steady State gets more complicated,
modified, difficult to check,
so I think, if the next couple
of years go as these have gone,
we shall for a generation or two
hold onto the most naive cosmology.
Wouldn't it be nice
if we were older?
While this cosmological debate was
raging, the sixties were in full swing.
Mini-skirts, the Mini Minor,
and, of course, the Moon landing.
Achieving the goal
before this decade is out
of landing a man on the Moon and
returning him safely to the Earth.
No single space project in this
period will be more impressive
to mankind or more important for
the long-range exploration of space,
and none will be so difficult
or expensive to accomplish.
But many people wanted to know
if this massive amount of cash
being spent to put men on
the Moon was really worth it.
After all, what possible use
could be made of the
Moon once we'd got there?
Since Kennedy made his
historic speech eight years ago,
nearly 50,000 million
dollars will have been spent
towards landing a man on the Moon.
This whole vast project has been
pursued with a single-mindedness
normally preserved for war
and yet the real objectives behind Kennedy's
momentous decision remain to most people obscure.
But the Moon does offer great opportunities
for scientific experimentation,
particularly for high-powered astronomy
away from the Earth's atmosphere.
When you look at the faintest
objects in the universe,
the Earth's atmosphere is
giving off its own light
and so as things get
further and further away
and therefore fainter and fainter,
you stop seeing them from the Earth.
The Moon would let you
see further out in space.
That means further back in time,
so you could probably distinguish
between the two theories of how
the universe itself came into being.
And this is probably the most fundamental
question one could ask in astronomy.
The whole question of cosmology,
perhaps the creation of the
universe is the most fundamental
question man's curiosity could
ever ask about his universe
and it seems to me that
an astronomical base
on the Moon could give us
the answer to that question.
A plaque on the lunar module reads,
"Here men from the planet Earth
"first set foot upon
the Moon, July 1969 AD.
"We came in peace for all mankind."
The reason why scientists were
prepared to go to such lengths
to try and settle
matters once and for all,
was that although the Big Bang seemed to be
winning the two horse cosmological stakes,
there were still some things the theory
couldn't explain, like how galaxies formed.
And, as problems went,
this was a big one.
Hoyle and the Steady State
stable reckoned that the Big Bang
would have been such
a powerful explosion
that it would have produced
nothing but a homogenous hot fuzz.
And that's a problem.
For stars and galaxies to form
there would need to be imperfections
in the amorphous soup of the Big Bang,
tiny variations, some regions that
were slightly denser than others.
These slightly denser regions would
gradually attract more and more matter
until eventually the
first galaxies emerged.
To stand any chance of
finding these tiny variations,
scientists had to go back to Penzias'
and Wilson's background radiation.
If there were any imperfections
in the hot fuzz of the Big Bang,
they should also be observable
in the background radiation.
But the problem with
the background radiation
is that its signal is incredibly faint,
impossible to accurately
decipher any unevenness
through the Earth's atmosphere.
In the late 1970s,
a group of enterprising scientists
thought they'd solved the problem
by borrowing a high flying U2 reconnaissance
plane, legendary for its Cold War spying missions.
Now, they were able to
spy on the early universe.
In 1977 and '78,
a new reconnaissance in detail was
carried out by a group at Berkeley.
They few high in the air
in an old U2 spy plane.
All right, tape recorder on?
Right, we're reading on scale
and we're reading plus 18.
Now, turn the rotation system on.
The U2 is fitted with a
pair of open receding horns.
They're small ones matched
to millimetre waves.
Their task is to scan the sky,
comparing one direction with another
to see if the signal shows
any sign of directionality.
True heat radiation is free
of all directional detail.
It is seamless and bland,
uniform in every direction,
the sign of an utterly
uniform fireball long ago.
The horns rotate to exchange places
and cancel out any inbuilt bias.
The sky is all but black in
the thin air 13 miles high,
where the U2 flies above
most of the atmosphere.
Professor Richard Muller
tells of his results.
On the first few flights that
we had, we could begin to see
that the uniformity of the radiation
wasn't perfect. There were features.
By the time we had several
flights spread out over a year,
the pattern was making itself evident.
There was a most intense region.
As you look off in the sky,
it's in the constellation of Leo.
And, very significantly,
the least intense region
was 180 degrees away
in the constellation of Aquarius.
What's more, the variations
between these regions
was very smooth and uniform.
This gave us a ready interpretation
of what was causing it
and, in fact, it was not
an intrinsic variation
in the background radiation
itself, but was due
to the motion of the Earth
through the background radiation.
Although interesting, the U2 had
failed to find the predicted ripples
in the background radiation.
There was still no
evidence for how galaxies
had formed out of the Big Bang.
And things were about to get even
worse for the Big Bang brigade.
When massive computers arrived
on the scene in the 1980s,
cosmologists had a new tool to try
and understand how galaxies emerged.
But their calculations
revealed something strange.
Galaxies, it seemed, could not have
formed from ordinary matter alone.
Normal matter just wasn't
made of the right stuff
to clump together and produce galaxies
quickly enough after the Big Bang.
99% of all the material in the universe
is invisible to us.
Some dark invisible form
Another strange type of material
must have been at work as well,
but, unfortunately, it didn't
seem to shine like normal matter.
Which meant nobody was able to see it.
So, imaginatively, it
was called dark matter.
In short, to explain how galaxies
came about, scientists had to call
on a new type of exotic material,
dense enough to help galaxies to form,
yet inconveniently invisible.
The next step was to find out what
this mysterious dark matter was made of.
The favourite explanation was
that it might be made of an,
as yet, undiscovered particle.
Very small and very difficult to detect,
which means that if you're to
stand any chance of finding one,
you need to be somewhere
very quiet indeed.
We're faced with the fact that the
dark matter events are very rare.
We expect, in fact, only
about one a day in perhaps
a kilogram of material like this.
Now, that makes life very difficult,
because at the surface of the Earth,
that one a day would be swamped
by the other types of radiation
which we have around us.
So the group looked for
the quietest place on Earth,
and found it in Yorkshire.
But not up here, down there,
1,000 metres below the ground.
A strange place to look for the missing
matter in our universe, one would think,
but if you're looking for an
ultra low background environment,
this is the place to come, the
deepest mine shaft in Europe.
Here, the half-mile of rock above their
heads is blocking out the cosmic radiation.
We suspend our experiment in
the middle of this water tank,
then we will have the ideal environment
for searching for the very rare dark
matter events which we're searching for.
The results of the UK Boulby salt mine
experiment should start coming through in 1993.
The cosmologists wait in suspense.
Will the elusive dark matter be
found down the bottom of a mine?
The year 1993 came and went and there
was still no sign of dark matter.
Science seemed to have gone as far
as it possibly could in the search
for an explanation of the
universe by looking into the sky.
Unfortunately, what it
saw could only make sense
by invoking strange types of
matter that nobody could find.
But help was at hand from
an unexpected discipline -
particle physicists,
who spend their lives
creating strange types of
matter by smashing atoms together
and seeing what fell out of the debris.
It seems that the key to
the largest thing imaginable
might just be found in
the tiniest thing possible.
Matter now is much like it was
at the beginning of the Big Bang.
We need to tell about particle physics.
This is just like a great exploration.
First of all, what do we
realty know about the Big Bang?
We are learning more and
more about the Big Bang
from astronomical
observations, but, perhaps
more interesting still,
we are learning more and more about
the Big Bang too from particle physics.
In fact, it isn't quite clear whether
the physicists who are interested
in elementary particles are
teaching the cosmologists
more at this moment or vice versa.
You see, in the first few seconds of
the universe, very near its origin,
the average energy of the particles
is extremely high, very, very high,
much higher than the
energies of particles produced
in the biggest accelerators here
on Earth, such as the one at CERN.
And in fact, the Big Bang is
sometimes nicknamed, for that reason,
the poor man's accelerator.
Particle physics and cosmology
was a match made in heaven.
The study of the vast cosmos
and the search for the tiny
building blocks of matter turned
out to be two sides of the same coin.
About 15 billion years ago,
there were no stars in the sky.
There wasn't even a sky.
All that existed was
the primordial fireball.
That fireball of energy condensed
into the simplest building blocks of
matter at the birth of our universe.
What were those fundamental entities from
which the stars and galaxies have been built?
Physicists are trying to answer
that question by taking matter apart,
looking at the pieces,
in effect looking back in time at
the earliest stages of creation.
And at these earliest
stages of creation,
matter existed in a weird
and wonderful primeval form.
I suspect at the very beginning of
the Big Bang, nature was quite simple
and it was only as the incredible
temperature began to cool off,
that all the rich variety
of forces and particles
that we know about
today began to appear.
When the universe was so extremely hot,
a curious state of affairs prevailed.
Let's see what our calculations tell us.
Right at the start of the Big Bang,
there was a high degree of symmetry
among all the different kinds of force
and the different types of
particles that filled the universe.
But that state of affairs
lasted for only an instant.
Almost immediately, the
perfect symmetry was lost.
This all happened, in perhaps,
one ten thousandth of a second
after the beginning of Big Bang.
At very small scales,
matter now is much like it was
at the beginning of the Big Bang.
There's a high degree of symmetry
among al the kinds of forces
and the types of particles.
We've just arrived too late
in the history of the universe
to see this symmetry easily so we have
to try to recreate it in our laboratory,
making little bangs in our accelerators.
The protons are in the machine,
we're ready at this end.
In short, particle
accelerators, it was hoped,
would provide mini Big Bangs,
tiny examples of the original conditions
under which all matter,
even dark matter, was formed.
I call it sometimes the greatest
adventure of the human mind,
which is the discovery to
penetrate as far as possible,
to understand as much as
possible about this universe,
what matter is made out of, and this
is just like a great exploration.
It was an exploration that
required particle accelerators
able to generate energies close to those
that must have been
present at the Big Bang.
So, Hans, it looks like
we finally got collisions.
And this meant building giant machines.
It almost seems a paradox that the
smaller the thing you're looking for,
the bigger the instrument you need.
Near Geneva, the mysteries of the atom
are probed in this gigantic laboratory.
It straddles the Swiss French border.
This one cited near San
Francisco is two miles long.
Even for an experimenter driving
a fast car, it's a long ride,
yet the electrons that fly along
the accelerator do the journey in
a hundred thousandth of a second.
The machine tortures matter.
Picture by picture, we catch
glimpses of how the universe looked
a few minutes after the creation.
The particles produced
in these collisions
are much too small to be seen.
Their presence is revealed only by
the tracks they leave behind them
as they pass through
the detecting equipment.
The way we do find out about this proton
and the first kind of experiments
that we've been making,
is to tear the electron
off the atom and accelerate
the proton faster and faster and
let it plough into a mass of atoms,
into a piece of ordinary matter,
hoping it'll hit one of the
other protons say, hydrogen gas,
and then see what
happens, what comes out.
It would be like trying to find out
what a watch is made out of
and how the mechanism works
by the expedient of smashing two watches together
and seeing what kind of gear wheels fly out.
These patterns, the lengths
and shapes of these tracks,
describe the life
histories of particles.
Some of them live only a
few billionths of a second
and the tracks are the only
evidence of their fleeting existence.
Interpreting these pictures, deciding
what they tell us about the universe,
needs colossal imagination, the
finest scientific minds of our time.
These properties of atoms
that we've found here
are the same we have found out as
the properties of atoms on the stars.
It's the universe that we're looking at.
So, we're not just
exploring a little thing
and maybe you go very deep and it looks smaller
and smaller, it's only small in dimension.
As far as the universe is
concerned, it's all encompassing.
So, it's a tremendous adventure.
It's apparently important, it's the result
of curiosity, it's impossible to stop.
Back at CERN in Geneva,
the particle experiments soon attracted
the curiosity of the local population.
As many documentary filmmakers
have come to realise over the years,
particle physics has a habit of becoming
insanely complicated very quickly.
VOICES MERGE
CERN is a strange and baffling place.
Its essential events are invisible.
They take place inside stainless steel
tubes or inside physicists' heads.
The physicists' work and ideas are
as difficult to understand for us
as the building bricks of
matter are for the physicist.
Like them, we must rely on
echoes and shadows like these.
John Cherub visited CERN again
for the purpose of this film.
He talks with John Bell, a CERN theoretician,
about how to make a film about CERN.
Well, it seems that one of
the most difficult things
we have to talk about is
how actually to put across
some of the basic ideas
in particle physics
that will be necessary to anyone who wants
to understand what goes on here at CERN.
What sort of people are you aiming at?
- What sort of background do these people have?
- Varied.
I mean very varied indeed and for some,
continuing interest in the sciences,
sometimes a very well informed
interest and sometimes not.
And are you aiming to
tell about particle physics
or about particle physicists?
Mainly about particle physics,
but incidentally about
particle physicists.
So then you want a sort of
formal lecture or somebody
On the contrary no, no, no.
Somebody starts by telling people
matter is composed of small pieces
and these small pieces are composed
of still smaller pieces and so on.
And the atom is something
that you can describe to people
because that's like
the planetary system.
There is a centre and there
are a number of electrons
going around this centre
which is the nucleus.
And it seems to me that
you can tell people that.
There's nothing strange
about that except the scale,
that it is very small.
But as soon as you delve deeper
into the atom, things get stranger.
So the condition for a
theory in which the infinities
can be handled at all,
a necessary condition
is that the coupling constant has a
dimensionality which is positive or zero.
The coupling constant
appears in the Lagrange,
multiplying some kind of operator.
Hidden within the maze of
mathematics were descriptions
of an array of sub-atomic particles
no-one had ever seen before.
To detect these particles,
scientists built increasingly
bigger and better accelerators.
These are getting 100 times
the energies they've got now.
But it will be exciting. There
have been tremendous advances
in theoretical physics, in
particle physics, since I came.
And what gradually emerged from
these atom-smashing experiments
was a detailed picture of
the very early universe.
By the 1980s, particle accelerators
were so powerful that they allowed
scientists to catch a glimpse of what our universe
looked like just moments after the Big Bang.
Although great strides had been
made by the particle physicists,
the irritating fact remained that
even with the mysterious dark matter
that nobody could find, the
Big Bang just didn't work
without the ripples in the Penzias
and Wilson cosmic background radiation,
the telltale patches of hot and cold that
the U2 spy plane had failed to detect.
In a last desperate attempt to
find the all-important ripples,
a satellite called COBE
was going to be launched
on board a space shuttle in 1988.
But on 28th January 1986,
the entire project was
thrown into jeopardy.
The Challenger disaster meant that
NASA had to reassess its whole space
shuttle strategy and, before long,
COBE was dropped from the programme.
The COBE team were forced to
find a substitute launch vehicle,
and at last managed to get the
satellite off the ground in 1989.
Three, two.
We have main engine start and lift off.
lift off of Delta 189 and the Cosmos
Observation Background Explorer. And
the vehicle has cleared the tower
And when its data eventually trickled back to
Earth, there was finally cause for celebration.
This is the eve of the
anniversary of COBE's launch,
the third anniversary,
and we're taking time out
from the hard work to
celebrate this great event.
COBE is still gathering data.
You see the unit infrared
universe here with some stars
in our galaxy showing up
300,000 years after the Big Bang.
When we watched the COBE we thought
it would only go maybe a year.
That was what the original plan was,
but we all hoped that it would go longer.
So we're now actually in
the third year and hoping
to run successfully to run
to the end of the fourth year.
Their first results had been
faint and difficult to interpret,
but with an analytical
team that's grown to 100,
they now seem far more confident.
There's the middle of our galaxy,
and there's something else here.
This part of the sky is
much brighter than this part.
Much brighter means one part in a
thousand to us and it's not really much.
But this is due to the motion of the
Earth relative to the rest of the universe.
Now, our data processing has actually proceeded
to where we can subtract this part out.
We can subtract out the
emissions from our own galaxy
across the middle and we can deduce
the part that is really cosmic.
The remaining tiny fluctuations compete
with noise from the detector itself.
It takes time to extract
a signal from the noise.
We started out at COBE
knowing that nobody knew
how these giant structures
and clumpiness could occur.
There's still no complete theory
of how this clumpiness emerged
and what it means, but at least they
do have data for theorists to work on.
This is a map of the universe
as it was 300,000 years after
the primeval explosion
with a few additions here.
This portion here in the
middle is from our own galaxy.
Now, what we see here are hot spots, the
red ones are hot and the blue ones are cold,
and those things are about a part in a hundred
thousand brighter or colder than the average here.
So these spots are going to grow
up to be gigantic structures,
300 million light years
across in our present age.
We have seen them
before they've blown up,
before they've expanded
with the universe.
It was the long-awaited result.
At last the variations in the
background radiation had been found,
a quarter of a century
since Penzias and Wilson
had first heard the
echo from the Big Bang.
But, despite COBE, Fred Hoyle did
not abandon his Steady State model.
Hoyle remained violently opposed to the
theory that he had inadvertently named.
He went to his grave in 2001
still believing that his theory was
correct and that Big Bang was wrong.
But the evidence was now
stacked up against him.
The fact that Hubble had observed
galaxies hurtling away from each other,
which meant our universe was expanding.
That Penzias and Wilson
had detected radiation
left over from a primordial fireball.
Main engines start, and lift off!
And that COBE had detected ripples
within this cosmic radiation.
All of this has provided overwhelming
evidence for a universe created by a Big Bang.
Although one problem persists.
The wonderful dark matter, that is
so handy when it comes to explaining
how galaxies work, has
still not been found.
Not in the depths of a salt mine nor in
any of the existing particle accelerators.
But this may be about to change.
Very soon, the large Hadron Collider
at CERN in Geneva will be switched on.
It's a particle accelerator
capable of creating the conditions
less than a billionth of a
second after the Big Bang itself.
For the first time
in 13.7 billion years,
scientists will be able to see
what Hoyle claimed they never could.
They will effectively be
able to witness creation.
This is like a huge new
microscope that will bring us
visibility to a different world.
The universe, like everybody else,
is made of pieces which
need to be understood
in order to understand
how the universe works.
Some of the technologies
we are using did not exist
when we started actually
designing these detectors.
So, just how do you go about
building a Big Bang machine?
First, burrow down 100 metres,
drill through the rock until you
have a 27-kilometre, circular tunnel.
Around the tunnel cast vast chambers,
each the size of a cathedral.
Inside these,
engineer the most complex cameras
ever made to detect particles.
Then, after nearly two decades,
you can, at last,
contemplate the experiment.
The LHC will generate seven times the
energy of any previous accelerator.
By doing so, it will take us closer to
the Big Bang than we have ever been before.
You can feel, by walking
in the corridors of CERN
and of other laboratories in the world,
that the enthusiasm is increasing again
in anticipation of what may happen.
The scale of the forces at work
in this process is unprecedented,
the experiment
- a step into the unknown.
Science is what we do when we
don't know what we're doing.
That's a very good scene for science.
Revolutions sometimes come from
the fact that you hit a wall
and you realise that you
haven't understood anything.
Some believe it's the only way we
can grasp the reality of our universe.
We are actually at a point where
only experiments can tell
us what the way forward is.
From a leap of faith, prompted
by what one man recorded
from scanning the heavens in 1929,
to teetering on the very brink
of scientific fact in 2008,
the Big Bang's journey through
eight decades of philosophical debate
and scientific endeavour might finally
be approaching an historic denouement.
On the other hand, if the final
pieces of the cosmological jigsaw
don't fall into place at the LHC,
then our journey has only just begun.